Bip!

WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN:
Engage U-scan terminal. Push start-button.
“Welcome to Tops. If you have a Tops favored-customer card, please scan it now.”
Carefully place Tops favored-customer keytag over scanner platen.
“Bip!”
“Welcome Tops favored-customer. Please scan your first item now.
Please place scanned item in plastic bag that clutters landfill 700 years.
Ah-ah-ah! Naughty-naughty! Not in reuseable shopping bag.
Please place scanned item in plastic bag that clutters landfill 700 years.”
“Over here, sir,” the pimply young attendent interjects. “You can transfer your groceries to your reuseable shopping bag, after which I throw out your plastic bag, thereby consigning it to clutter the landfill 700 years.”

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED:
Engage U-scan terminal. Push start-button.
“Welcome to Tops. If you have a Tops favored-customer card, please scan it now.”
Place Tops favored-customer keytag over scanner platen.
Nothing.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” I think. “This is the same thing that happened last week.”
Transfer all groceries to another U-scan terminal; just like last week.
Engage U-scan terminal. Push start-button.
“Welcome to Tops. If you have a Tops favored-customer card, please scan it now.”
Gingerly place Tops favored-customer keytag over scanner platen.
Again, nothing.
Okay; try scanning groceries. It did that last week.
Nothing.
“I give up!” I say. “I got better things to do than waste time with a wonky machine.”
I’m always interested in fiddling technology.
I generally always use the U-scans; they’ve worked before.
Once in Altoony I attempted to use a ‘pyooter terminal to order a sub — that is, until a certain bluster-boy butted in, bellowing “I speak English” to the cowering clerk.
I wasn’t actually able to complete ‘pyooter ordering of a sub until my next visit, when the Bluster-Boy wasn’t along.

• “Tops” is a large supermarket-chain based in Buffalo we occasionally buy groceries at. They have a store in Canandaigua.
• “Altoony” is Altoona, PA, location of Horseshoe Curve (the “mighty Curve”), by far the BEST railfan spot I have ever been to. Horseshoe Curve is a national historic site. It was a trick used by the Pennsylvania Railroad to get over the Allegheny mountains without steep grades. Horseshoe Curve was opened in 1854, and is still in use. (I am a railfan, and have been since I was a child.)
• “‘Pyooter” is computer.
• The “Bluster-Boy” is my all-knowing, blowhard brother-from-Boston, the macho ad-hominem king, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say. —We had ridden our motorcyles to “the mighty Curve.” He, of course, rides a noisy Harley; and me a Honda, making me of-the-Devil.